Geithner talks up Obama, sort of

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner isn’t quite on the campaign trail by President Barack Obama — but he has been stumping for the president to business and community groups around the country to talk administration policy.

Since the start of the year, Geithner has defended and championed the president’s record in Charlotte, N.C., New York, Chicago, Dallas, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, and last week, in Baltimore.

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Geithner’s trips typically involve a speech before an audience in the hundreds put together by the local chamber of commerce or another civic group. For most, there’s also a question-and-answer period moderated by an area journalist, along with business leader roundtables. Usually, there’s even the factory tours that are a campaign trail staple.

Geithner’s never held elective office, and as the former president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, he’s more closely tied to Wall Street than any other member of Obama’s Cabinet. He’s already ruled out returning for a second term, even if Obama is reelected. But as treasury secretary, he’s able to draw a different kind of audience, and he’s used that to talk up the White House’s record to the kinds of business leaders that the president himself is courting as he seeks a second term.

There’s an assumption that the events will contain a political tinge — but having Geithner at the microphone helps temper that.

“They fully expected he would justify the policy actions taken by the Obama administration, but he did so in a way that people didn’t find [it] overbearing,” said Donald Fry, a former Democratic politician who hosted Geithner as president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

Not everyone’s been swayed, with several attendees saying the events resembled an Obama rally instead of a discussion about the economy —and that’s a turnoff.

“When it becomes a stump speech, or begins to feel that way, then it begins to feel like a subjective opinion,” Jeff Kleen, a public policy advocate at the Oregon Food Bank, said, expressing his personal opinion about Geithner’s talk in Portland last month. “I start to look for the spin, rather than hear the secretary of the treasury.”

The administration is sensitive to any charges that Geithner is making a reelection case for Obama. Similar trips have occurred throughout his time in office, though the calendar indicates they’ve increased. He has yet to venture deeply into battleground states, and notably, while he plans to continue the tours, the administration says the appearances will become less frequent as November approaches and the election dominates the conversation.

And Geithner will not attend the Democratic convention in Charlotte in September, said treasury spokesman Anthony Coley, who described the speeches, factory visits and roundtable conversations as “valuable opportunities for the secretary to listen, learn and explain.”

The treasury secretary lends an explicitly apolitical gloss as he presses the need for a balanced approach to bring down budget deficits that have topped $1 trillion a year under Obama.

“Remember, the basic arithmetic of fiscal and economic policy is not political,” Geithner has said in his speeches. “There is no Democratic or Republican fiscal math. If you try to restore fiscal balance without a penny of additional revenue, then you have to cut deeply — too deeply — into critical functions of government.”